The MPAA Surrenders in War Against Piracy

Guba.com continues to host copyrighted files that it has picked up via the Usenet newsgroups, that you can download without registration, payment, or special software. The MPAA doesn't seem to care. So what does that say about the war against piracy?

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Somewhere in the bowels of Stansted Airport in London once sat Lucky and Flo, two Labrador retrievers, the latest weapons in the war on piracy.

Originally commissioned by the UK's FACT (Federation Against Copyright Theft), Lucky and Flo are now employed by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which plans to take the dogs on a "world tour", sniffing out fake DVDs in cities around the globe.

It's a high-profile war, and apparently no expense is being spared. But what about the Web? What if there was an easily accessible source of illegally copyrighted materials, with a search engine, on a site that had participated in a press release with the MPAA itself, touting new automated measures to prevent piracy? Wouldn't the MPAA see the forest for the trees and quickly crack down on the offender?

As it turns out, apparently not.

I'm talking about Guba.com, which offers for-pay online rentals and purchases of licensed movies and TV shows, but also archives files published to Usenet, a collection of text-based newsgroups that can hide encodings of copyrighted material often spread across dozens of separate messages.

What I did do, though, was follow up yet again with the MPAA, which unfortunately did not return calls for my original story. My memory here is faulty, but I believe I made five phone calls over a period of three days, to both the Washington D.C. and Los Angeles offices. I'm pretty sure that by the fifth phone call I left a message along these lines:

"Hi, this is Mark Hachman from PC Magazine. I'm calling about Guba.com, a site that is archiving copyrighted content  not clips, mind you, but whole files  and making them available for download. I believe Guba is a partner of yours, since you co-authored a press release with them in July. Would someone be available for comment?"

I thought that such a message would instantly put me in touch with someone on the MPAA's legal team, eager to crack down on the offending site. Nope. It instead prompted this statement, given to me Thursday night by a spokeswoman in the MPAA's Los Angeles office. ("Johnny" is the name of the automated filtering software Guba developed.)

"It's our understanding that Guba.com is committed to using 'Johnny' to filter MPAA movies on their network," the spokeswoman said. "They've been working with us in good faith, and they'll continue to do so. We have a relationship with Guba, and they have a commitment into making sure that they don't offer copyrighted content. We'll continue to monitor the situation, and if for some reason it doesn't happen we will talk to them."

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Compare and contrast that statement with one offered by the MPAA a year ago:

"The MPAA has developed a multi-pronged approach to combat piracy, and we are working to deliver our movies to consumers in new and innovative ways," Gayle Osterberg, a spokesperson for the MPAA, said then. "However, when it comes to consumers stealing our product, we also have a very aggressive enforcement aspect to our anti-piracy program. In cases where people are illegally downloading films, there is a great likelihood that they risk being sued at some point down the line."

When I asked the MPAA representative to view the Guba site to confirm that copyrighted files were available there for free download, apparently illegally, the spokeswoman refused. When I offered to point her to an apparently illegally ripped DVD copy of The Ring available on the site, she also declined.
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